Medium & production · Hand & relief
Woodblock & linocut
Carved relief printing.
A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under medium & production: what technology shaped it?
- styles make it
- 58
- as a defining choice
- 22
- as a usual one
- 15
- now and then
- 21
- avoid it
- 0
Styles defined by it 22
For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.
Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho)The page and letter of the East Asian book.
Nianhua & Chinese Folk PrintWoodblock pictures bought each New Year and pasted on doors, walls and kitchen shrines to invite luck and ward off harm: paired door gods, plump babies with carp, the Kitchen God, opera scenes and auspicious rebuses.
- Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags)Tibetan Buddhist and Bön woodblock printing, from the first printed Kangyur (1410, cut in China) and the 15th-century presses of Gungthang to the great printing houses of Narthang, Derge and Lhasa.
- Đông Hồ & Hàng Trống Folk PrintsVietnam's two classic folk-print schools, bought for Tết. Đông Hồ families press each colour from its own carved block onto giấy điệp, dó paper brushed with ground scallop shell whose streaked, faintly sparkling surface serves as the white, and print the black line last.
- Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock (Douban & Gonghua)A kind of colour woodblock printing begun in late-Ming Nanjing, made so that a print looks like a brush painting.
Tarot de Marseille Woodcut CardsThe standard pattern of French tarot cards, descended from Milanese tarot and recut by card-makers in Paris, Lyon, Avignon, Dijon and Marseille from the 17th century.
Lubok Popular PrintCheap single-sheet Russian popular prints sold at fairs and by pedlars from the later 17th century: woodcut, later engraved and lithographed pictures of saints, fables, heroes, battles and satire in which text and image share one sheet.
Ukiyo-e Woodblock PrintsMass-produced Edo-period woodblock prints of actors, courtesans, legends and landscapes, designed by an artist, cut and printed by specialist craftsmen and sold cheaply by commercial publishers.
Imagerie d'Épinal & European BilderbogenCheap single-sheet popular prints sold by pedlars across 19th-century Europe, led by the Pellerin imagerie at Épinal and the Neuruppin Bilderbogen.
Expressionist Woodcut GraphicsThe graphic arm of German Expressionism, from Die Brücke in Dresden (1905) to the Berlin journals Der Sturm and Die Aktion and Frans Masereel's woodcut novels.
- Estridentismo (Stridentist) GraphicsMexico's first avant-garde (1921-27), launched when Manuel Maples Arce pasted his manifesto Actual No. 1 on Mexico City walls.
- MavoTokyo's anarchist avant-garde, founded in July 1923 by Murayama Tomoyoshi, back from a year in Berlin, with four former Futurists, and its magazine MAVO (seven issues, July 1924 to August 1925).
Chinese Modern Woodcut MovementThe leftist print movement launched by Lu Xun's 1931 Shanghai woodcut workshop, which made the self-cut black-and-white woodcut China's art of national crisis and revolution.
Taller de Gráfica PopularA Mexico City printmaking collective founded in 1937 around Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O'Higgins and Luis Arenal to put art at the service of popular and anti-fascist struggles.
Literatura de Cordel WoodcutThe cover art of Brazil's literatura de cordel, pocket chapbooks of verse whose single picture is a small woodcut cut in soft umburana wood and printed in black above a plain letterpress title.
Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuit PrintmakingPrints from the Inuit co-operative studio at Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, with a catalogued collection every year since 1959.
Rorke's Drift LinocutThe prints of the Lutheran art centre that Swedish teachers Peder and Ulla Gowenius started at Ceza Hospital in 1962 and moved to Rorke's Drift in 1963: under apartheid, which denied Black South Africans formal fine-art education, the chief training ground for many Black artists.
Gráfica del 68 (Mexican Student Movement Graphics)The graphics of the 1968 Mexican student movement, made in days by brigades in the print workshops of San Carlos and La Esmeralda and in improvised school workshops.
Torres Strait Islander LinocutRelief prints by Torres Strait Islander artists of Zenadth Kes, which grew from an Indigenous visual art course at Cairns College of TAFE by 1991 and the Mualgau Minaral collective on Mua (Moa) Island.
- Indonesian Woodcut Activism (Taring Padi)The protest graphics of Taring Padi, the collective founded by students and activists in Yogyakarta in 1998 as Suharto fell, and of the punk and activist woodcut scenes around it.
- Oaxacan Protest Printmaking & Street Graphics (ASARO)The street graphics of Oaxaca City since the 2006 teachers' strike and APPO uprising, when ASARO, the stencil collective Lapiztola and later workshops such as Colectivo Subterráneos made the colonial centre's walls a newspaper.
Extinction Rebellion GraphicsThe visual identity of Extinction Rebellion, the climate movement founded in Stroud in 2018, built by its volunteer Art Group as a free kit anyone may print.
Styles that often use it 15
A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.
Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur TraditionThe broken scripts of the Latin West.
Renaissance Book TypographyThe printed book as shaped by humanist Italy and France: roman and italic types modelled on humanist handwriting, a single justified text block set in harmonious proportions within generous margins, and woodcut initials, borders and printer's devices as the only ornament.
Emblem Book (Motto, Picture & Epigram)A European book genre in which, from Chrestien Wechel's Paris edition of 1534 on, every page or opening repeats one fixed unit: a short motto, an allegorical picture and an explanatory verse, which only together yield a moral, amorous or religious meaning.
Rinpa & Saga-bonA Kyoto school of decorative design that revived the poetry and court painting of the Heian period, begun around 1600 by the calligrapher Hon'ami Kōetsu and the painter Tawaraya Sōtatsu and carried on less by teaching than by admiration across generations: Ogata Kōrin, Sakai Hōitsu, Kamisaka Sekka.
Adinkra & Kente Symbol SystemsThe Akan textile languages of Ghana.
- Thai Yantra (Yant) DiagramsThai protective diagrams in which Pali formulae, written in Khom, a sacred script derived from Khmer, are packed into squares, circles, triangles, spires and the outlines of Buddhas, monks and tigers, often framed by lines of script.
Edo-moji Commercial Lettering (Kanteiryū, Yose-moji, Sumō-ji)The fat, ink-heavy brush hands that Edo's professional sign and bill writers made for the city's entertainments: Kanteiryū for kabuki signboards and playbills from 1779, yose-moji for rakugo halls, sumō-ji for sumo ranking sheets, and squarish kago-moji for votive name slips.
- Kalighat Pat & Battala Bazaar PrintsThe bazaar art of nineteenth-century Calcutta: watercolours sold to pilgrims by patua painters at the Kalighat temple, and the cheap woodcuts and metal engravings that Battala presses printed for chapbooks and almanacs.
Arts & Crafts MovementA British-led reform movement that answered industrial shoddiness with honest handcraft, medieval models and the ideal of joy in labour.
JaponismeThe Western absorption of Japanese woodblock prints, textiles and crafts after Japan reopened to trade in the 1850s.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)Cheap broadsheets, chapbooks and gazettes sold on the streets of Porfirian Mexico City by the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and illustrated by Manuel Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada.
Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)The Dutch branch of Art Nouveau, seen mostly in book covers, vignettes and posters.
- German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung)The German reform of the book, from the magazine Pan (1895) to the private presses that ended around 1933.
Santiniketan & Bengal School GraphicsThe nationalist, anti-academic art of Calcutta and Santiniketan, which turned from oil-paint naturalism and chromolithograph gloss to Indian and pan-Asian sources.
- Vorticism & BLAST TypographyLondon's short-lived rival to Futurism, launched by Wyndham Lewis with BLAST (dated 20 June 1914; War Number, July 1915).
Styles that use it now and then 21
An occasional choice in these styles.
- Chinese Calligraphy & Seal Carving (Shufa & Zhuanke)c. 0–present
- Kamon (Japanese Family Crests)c. 1100–present
- European Heraldryc. 1140–present
- Mongol Bichig Calligraphy & Ugalz Ornamentc. 1204–present
- Sápmi Graphic Identity (Duodji & Gákti Colour Code)1600–present
- Pacific Barkcloth (Tapa) Design1700–present
- Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing1822–1956
- Celtic Revival Illumination & Lettering1861–1951
- African Wax & Fancy Print1880–present
- Norwegian and Finnish National Romantic Graphics (Munthe & Karelianism)1880–1922
- Kanga (Swahili Message Cloth)1886–present
- Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)1887–present
- Russian Futurist Book1910–1920
- Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration1910–1940
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics1925–1971
- WPA Silkscreen Posters1935–1943
- Vietnamese Propaganda Poster (Tranh cổ động)1945–present
- Chicano Screenprint Poster1965–present
- Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China')2003–present
- Latin American Feminist Protest Graphics (Ni Una Menos and the Green Wave)2015–present
- Chilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20)2019–2022
It often goes with
Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.
- Carved linein 47 of 58
- Paper & letterpress bitein 43 of 58
- Line illustrationin 51 of 58
- Letterpressin 25 of 58
- Spiritual & sacredin 34 of 58
- Monochromein 41 of 58